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“A partnership of the American Folklore Society and the Indiana University Libraries, Open Folklore is a scholarly resource devoted to increasing the number and variety of open access resources, published and unpublished, that are available for the field of folklore studies and the communities with whom folklore scholars partner….”

“The SCA is experimenting with new ways of making our content accessible beyond the echo chamber of our discipline. As a section, we consider the accessibility of our work to be crucial aspects of public engagement and worlding anthropology, especially in contentious political moments. Our strategy centers on our efforts to make Cultural Anthropology a fully open-access journal, promote the ongoing series on our lively website, and generate buzz surrounding our social media that currently reach over 40,000 followers. All of this is made possible by a large team of student and postdoctoral contributing editors who make up the discipline’s next generation. Here, we highlight a sample of these activities in order to invite more scholars and students to the SCA.”

“The expedition is unusual in the traditionally closed, guarded field of paleoanthropology—it is officially an open access paleoanthropological expedition. This means that expedition members blogged, tweeted, and video chatted to share their work with schools, teachers, and the public all over the world. The open-access ethos of Rising Star represents a radical shift toward a more collaborative and inclusive place….”

“Just over a year ago Cultural Anthropology went Open Access. It has been an exhilarating experience, which has seen the journal engage new publics and conversations, as well as explore new intellectual and editorial possibilities. For those involved in the running of the journal, it has also demanded a steep learning curve. We, the Board of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, thought it would be a good idea to put down in writing some of these lessons whilst responding to a recent memorandum (5/4/15) to Section Presidents, Journal Editors, and Section Treasurers that recapitulates the AAA’s history of scholarly publishing. As we write, Michael Chibnik (AA’s Editor-in-Chief) has published an editorial expressing his hesitation towards an OA solution for American Anthropologist.1 We take this opportunity to reply to Chibnik’s text too.

We offer here three brief reflections on why our experience with Cultural Anthropology has reassured us that Open Access is the future of scholarly publishing. First, we draw attention to the fact that Open Access offers perhaps the most robust model for managing the AAA journals’ portfolio in accordance with its history of collective responsibility. Second, we offer some insights into the changing landscape of scholarly publishing in the digital age. Last, we remind readers that Open Access is, perhaps above all other things, a moral and political decision.

We were prompted to write when we found out that, to our surprise and concern, the memorandum made no mention at all of Open Access in general, nor of Cultural Anthropology’s decision to no longer work with Wiley-Blackwell and to publish independently and Open Access beginning in 2014. These elisions are concerning because they ignore Open Access as a viable option for the future development of AAA’s collective portfolio….”

“The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association has approved a resolution to boycott Israel, which must now be voted on by the group’s membership….The resolution seeks to enlist a major academic publisher in excluding Israeli institutions from access to scholarly publications….”

“After a month of intense conversations and negotiations, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) will bring the ‘Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act’ up for mark-up on Wednesday, July 29th. The language that will be considered is an amended version of FASTR, officially known as the ‘Johnson-Carper Substitute Amendment,’ which was officially filed by the HSGAC leadership late on Friday afternoon, per committee rules. There are two major changes from the original bill language to be particularly aware of. Specifically, the amendment Replaces the six month embargo period with ‘no later than 12 months, but preferably sooner’ as anticipated; and Provides a mechanism for stakeholders to petition federal agencies to ‘adjust’ the embargo period if the12 months does not serve ‘the public, industries, and the scientific community.’ We understand that these modifications were made in order accomplish a number of things: Satisfy the requirement of a number of Members of HSGAC that the language more closely track that of the OSTP Directive; Meet the preference of the major U.S. higher education associations for a maximum 12 month embargo; Ensure that, for the first time, a number of scientific societies will drop their opposition for the bill; and Ensure that any petition process an agency may enable is focused on serving the interests of the public and the scientific community …”

“Impact is multi-dimensional, the routes by which impact occur are different across disciplines and sectors, and impact changes over time. Jane Tinkler argues that if institutions like HEFCE specify a narrow set of impact metrics, more harm than good would come to universities forced to limit their understanding of how research is making a difference. But qualitative and quantitative indicators continue to be an incredible source of learning for how impact works in each of our disciplines, locations or sectors.”

“Open access for monographs and book chapters is a relatively new area of publishing, and there are many ways of approaching it. With this in mind, a recent publication from the Wellcome Trust aims to provide some guidance for publishers to consider when developing policies and processes for open access books. The Wellcome Trust recognises that implementation around publishing monographs and book chapters open access is in flux, and invites publishers to email Cecy Marden at c.marden@wellcome.ac.uk with any suggestions for further guidance that would be useful to include in this document. ‘Open Access Monographs and Book Chapters: A practical guide for publishers’ is available to download as a pdf from the Wellcome Trust website.”

“The purpose of this post is to shed some light on a specific issue in the transition to open access that particularly affects small and low-cost publishers and to suggest one strategy to address this issue. In the words of one Resource Requirements interviewee: ‘So the other set of members that we used to have about forty library members , but when we went to open access online, we lost the whole bunch of libraries. Yeah, so basically we sent everybody ,you know, a letter saying we are going to open access online, the annual membership is only $30, we hope you will continue to support us even though there are no longer print journals, and then a whole flu of cancellations came in from a whole bunch of libraries, which we had kind of thought might happen but given how cheap we are, I have to say I was really disappointed when it indeed did happen especially from whole bunch of [deleted] libraries [for which our journal is extremely relevant]. I was going, seriously $30?’ Comments: for a university library, a society membership fee, when not required for journal subscriptions, may be difficult to justify from an accounting perspective. $30 is a small cost; however, for a university the administrative work of tracking such memberships and cutting a check every year likely exceeds the $30 cost. With 40 library members at a cost of $30, the total revenue for this journal from this source was $1,200. A university or university library could sponsor this amount at less than the cost of many an article processing charge. The university and library where the faculty member is located have a support program for open access journals; clearly the will, and some funding, is there. One of the challenges is transitioning subscription dollars to support for open access, as I address in my 2013 First Monday article. Following is one suggestion for libraries, or for faculty to suggest to their libraries: why not engage your faculty who are independent or society publishers to gain support for cancellations or tough negotiations and lower prices for the big deals of large, highly profitable commercial publishers that I argue are critical to redirect funding to our own publishing activities? Here is one scenario that may help to explain the potential …”

[From Google’s English] “UKB , the consortium of thirteen university libraries and the National Library, the objectives of The Hague Declaration endorsed by signing the joint declaration. All signatories state that there are no copyright restrictions are scientific results and research data. Everyone should be able to freely analyze facts and data.Licensing and copyright rules may not raise barriers before. The knowledge economy has an interest in global open access or open science. According to the statement must be contained in the European copyright rules that authors the right to (re) use of data and texts not lose by signing a contract with a publisher …”